Pure Storage Customers Will Have Possiblity to Upgrade to NVMe

Pure Storage, Inc. announced the introduction of its NVMe-Ready Guarantee.

It guarantees that every newly purchased FlashArray//M can be upgraded to NVMe through its EvergreenStorage program.

NVMe, a next-generation memory-class protocol for CPU-to-flash communication, is poised to drive a shift across the storage industry to NVMe architectures. Leading industry analysts forecast that NVMe, which is enabling the next generation of flash performance and density, will become the leading interface protocol for flash by 2019. A critical mass of consumer devices has already shifted to NVMe, and the enterprise will not be far behind.

“NVMe protocol is set to dominate enterprise flash, because it allows much greater performance than the SAS and SATA interfaces used currently in data center flash drives. SAS was designed for disk, but NVMe was designed both for flash and the new solid-state, non-volatile memories that are waiting in the wings,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Research. “Pure’s FlashArray//M systems are already future-proofed for this change, and that is a very unusual and important aspect.”

NVMe is faster and more parallel than the existing SAS storage protocol, and offers 64K parallel queues in comparison to a single SAS channel, which enables direct communication paths to SSDs. This parallelism eliminates the ‘serial-connection’ bottleneck enabling higher performance for coming technological advances, including massively multi-core CPUs, super-dense SSDs, new memory technologies and high-speed interconnects.

“Seven years ago, we saw the potential of flash as an industry standard. We have reached a similar inflection point with NVMe, and enterprises will need to be prepared for the shift to take full advantage of technological improvements in 2017 and beyond,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP of oroduct, Pure Storage. “Any organization buying new storage today needs to be NVMe-ready to protect its investment. By proactively engineering for NVMe, Pure has widened the gap between purpose-built arrays and legacy retrofits, and is best positioned to lead the industry transition to NVMe.”

In anticipation of the shift to NVMe, Pure Storage engineered FlashArray//M to be NVMe-ready from the beginning, starting more than three years ago. Every FlashArray//M ships with dual-ported and hot-pluggable NVMe NV-RAM devices, engineered by Pure and was released in 2015. Additionally, the FlashArray//M chassis is wired for both SAS and PCIe/NVMe in every flash module slot, which enables the use of SAS-connected flash modules today as well as a transition to NVMe in the future.

“As a solution provider and adviser, long-term customer relationships are critical to our ongoing success,” said Bruce Poor, VP sales, Hogan Consulting Group. “Customers deserve investment protection and the NVMe-Ready Guarantee from Pure Storage gives us increased confidence that we are giving customers the best value now, and into the future. A customer shouldn’t be penalized for not knowing what the future holds in their technology choice.”

Each of the slots within the FlashArray//M chassis is capable of using NVMe and SAS-capable flash modules, and controllers are non-disruptively upgradable to transition internal and external networks from SAS to NVMe. The Purity Operating Environment is optimized for NVMe with parallel and multi-threaded design, as well as global flash management across the entire flash pool. As a result, customers will be able to convert any FlashArray//M to NVMe-enabled controllers and capacity without a forklift upgrade or disruptive migration.

“End-user experience is the key to attracting and keeping great customers. The greatest challenge is keeping end-user experience first-class and consistent,” said Jason Michaud, president, MacStadium, Inc. “Pure Storage anticipates future technological needs like NVMe, and offers a clear, non-disruptive upgrade path, which enables us to stay up and running through periods of tremendous growth withour globally dispersed ITstaff.”

Upgrades to NVMe-enabled controllers are planned to be available prior to December 31, 2017.